1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of network connectivity and more particularly to end-to-end connectivity for heterogeneous networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has driven most information technologists to add support for networking infrastructure and applications based upon the Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Nonetheless, many continue to utilize applications, devices, and networking infrastructure based upon the well established Systems Network Architecture (SNA) or its follow-on, Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking (APPN). In the latter circumstance, SNA has formed the basis of mission-critical systems and applications that have been developed, enhanced, and tested over a period of decades.
SNA is often the underlying architecture of the applications that are at the very heart of the information technology infrastructure. Organizations managing both SNA and Internet protocol (IP) applications and infrastructure have had two basic choices: maintain two separate networks, or migrate to a common IP backbone and integrate both environments. Although expensive to maintain two different networks, some organizations accept the cost in order to minimize the disruption to the mission-critical SNA applications. Other, more ambitious organizations choose to integrate.
Recent technologies permit organizations to straddle the fence between integration and maintaining two separate networks. Utilizing data link switching (DLSw), enterprises have been able to transport SNA data over IP networks. While DLSw is a well-established technology, Enterprise Extender (EE) technology represents a superior approach to SNA/IP integration. EE technology offers organizations the ability to keep existing SNA devices and applications, but support pure IP from end to end with no loss of availability or reliability. In this regard, EE facilitates the creation of a totally IP-based network, from host to host.
Notably, until recently applications were mostly deployed in a homogeneous, secure and predictable environment which was centrally managed, EE enables a distributed, heterogeneous environment. The concurrent rise in popularity of new application technologies like Voice over IP (VoIP), video communications and distributed storage, however, has placed unforeseen stress on the newly integrated heterogeneous networks in that the real-time nature of these technologies require the heterogeneous network to be much more dynamic and resilient. The dynamic nature of the heterogeneous network also has added the requirement for applications to be much more aware of the network and the need to merge the application intelligence with the network and vice-versa.
The requirements, however, counter the ability to leverage both the SNA and TCP/IP network architectures to transport data end-to-end independent of network protocol. This is so because an application using SNA does not realize there is a path to the endpoint using the TCP/IP infrastructure unless the EE has been manually configured in both the Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM) and IP configuration definitions. Currently, EE allows the manual configuration of an APPN network using the UDP/IP architecture. However, these definitions are known to be prone to configuration errors. Yet, there is no mechanism to dynamically configure this APPN EE link based on the network overlay. Thus, despite the flexibility afforded by EE, at present, there is not a mechanism to dynamically build a network overlay to determine IP and SNA connectivity and subsequently, to use the information to determine data routing for an application independent of the network architecture.